You, sir, are no Barack Obama

This didn’t occur to me right away.

This week, Mitt Romney’s campaign pushed a foreign policy adviser, Richard Grenell, into resigning. Grenell, who worked loyally for the Bush Administration, had been told to “lay low”.

Grenell is gay and out, and reportedly supports same-sex marriage rights. Religious conservatives screamed, and so now the guy who worked for our country’s ambassador to the UN is no longer working for Romney.

It was a comment on this post that made me think of something.

A little over four years ago, then-Senator Barack Obama made a speech in Philadelphia where he confronted head on the conversation about race that was bubbling all around his candidacy. The speech needed to happen, especially in response to videos of the Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, making inflammatory remarks.

The conventional thing to do would’ve been to ignore Wright until something from the next news cycle replaced him, but that’s not what Obama did. Instead, he made this speech, a true “let’s cut the rhetoric and all say what we mean” moment that made me finally decide to vote for him. In the parlance of people who do what I do for a living, he pivoted, taking control of the conversation again by reframing it. 

Why didn’t Romney pivot? If he’d stuck to his guns, kept on the man he’d thought enough of to hire in the first place, and told the religious right to get over themselves (what are they going to do, vote for Obama?), Romney would’ve demonstrated such incredible leadership. Instead of sweeping Grenell under the rug, Romney easily could’ve pulled him into the spotlight as a way to start a conversation about his fairly moderate record. He could’ve said, “You know what, I’m glad you asked – yes, Richard is gay, and that’s totally irrelevant to the job I hired him to do.” But instead Romney went with “Richard? Who’s Richard? We don’t have a Richard here. See?”

Why am I going to put in the most important job in the world a guy who can’t even stand up to a shrinking bloc in the party who’s nomination he’s already sewn up? The president’s most significant job is hiring people – from the thousands of appointments he makes to staff federal agencies to Supreme Court justices. Whoever’s in that chair needs a pretty thick skin.

Moreover, it’s stupid politically. Romney just chose anti-gay fundamentalists over moderates and independents, who are usually the ones that decide presidential elections. I want my president to be smarter than that. I also expect him to have a spine.